Spoke with PI before applying

6 years industry research experience, 2 years academic research experience, 1 publication (3rd author), 1 conference presentation (march meeting) My to-be PI and the admissions chair emailed me on March 12 saying that I was on a 50 person waitlist. The chair said there were financial concerns and were cutting admissions (combination of high admission rate last year and federal funding). I followed up on 4/14 in the morning and heard from the chair around 10 pm MDT that I will not be admitted. I'm very disappointed because my PI and I had been working together for over 6 months developing a research plan. We got along well and I was excited to work on the project.

ms robotics, GPA 4.0

- 18 months of research experience at an AI lab during my undergraduate years - 1 paper accepted at an International conference (2024) in computational linguistics primarily focused on the Asia-Pacific region - 3 recommendation letters submitted (although 2 was the minimum required)

Email to check portal

From globally top 200 univ, rank 5%, second author Q1 publication

H-Index= 10

Applied for Robotics PhD, but got accepted to master's instead